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VATICAN CITY

Pope reaffirms commitment against same-sex marriage

Pope John Paul II kept up his campaign against gay marriage Saturday, telling the ambassador from Canada - where some provinces allow same-sex couples to wed - that such unions create a ''false understanding'' of marriage.

The pope spoke Saturday to the new Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, Donald Smith.

''The institution of marriage necessarily entails the complementarity of husbands and wives who participate in God's creative activity through the raising of children,'' said the pontiff, according to the text of the speech released by the Vatican.

SOUTH AFRICA

Engineer charged with buying nuclear bomb-related material

JOHANNESBURG - The South African police charged a 53-year-old engineer from the country's industrial heartland on Friday with buying materials for and assembling gas centrifuges to purify uranium, apparently for Libya's secret nuclear-bomb program.

It was the third arrest this year of a South African resident on nuclear-related charges. At least one of the others was also charged with making nuclear components for Libya's now-defunct bomb program.

NORTHERN IRELAND

Protestant gang tosses gasoline bombs into Catholic-filled pub

BELFAST - Protestant extremists crashed a forklift truck into a Belfast pub packed with Catholics early Friday and tossed gasoline bombs into the building on a road on the front line of tensions between the two communities.

No one was hurt in the attack, police said, though the forklift came crashing through a window just above a bench where a patron had been sitting seconds earlier, the bar's owner, Sean Conlon, said.

A Protestant gang used the stolen vehicle to smash down a heavy metal security grill on a window at around 12:45 a.m, then to toss three gasoline bombs inside the pub on Crumlin Road, an especially polarized part of north Belfast where Catholic-Protestant tensions have repeatedly flared.

EGYPT

Scholars think Great Pyramid has previously unknown room

CAIRO - A pair of French Egyptologists who suspect they have found a previously unknown chamber in the Great Pyramid urged Egypt's antiquities chief to reconsider letting them test their theory by drilling new holes in the 4,600-year-old structure.

Jean Yves Verd'hurt and fellow Frenchman Gilles Dormion, who have studied pyramid construction for more than 20 years, are expected to raise their views during the ninth International Congress of Egyptologists in Grenoble, France, which starts Monday. They also published a book about their theory last week.

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Brian Mac Intyre is on vacation. The Tribune World Desk compiled this column in his absence.